The Sweetness of Water

by Nathan Harris

  “Tell me what more I can do,” she said.

  “This is it. No more.”

  The usual shame washed over him, for revealing himself, for expressing such darkness, and there was still more yet. One last admission he could not let pass. The real truth was selfish, he told her. For while his wife and son were tethered to him and must endure him, Prentiss and Landry were not. What had he used them for but entertainment? What had he paid them for but to keep him company? To keep some facet of himself alive? Look at him—a man so afraid of the unknown that he’d never even been out of the county. His land was his only escape, the only place a man with such a narrowed existence might find a sense of adventure. So he kept the brothers around to keep that part of him alive. Yet where would he stand on the night when the men in town carried torches to his property and demanded payment on the misshapen justice they sought? He would not pay with his life. He couldn’t say the same for Prentiss and Landry.

  “I fear I would no sooner walk down the road with your hand in mine,” he told her, “than I would stand beside those two in the face of this town’s need for revenge. And this is the truth that breaks my heart, perhaps more than any other.”

  He began to suspect, without any evidence, that the grime on the floor was not spilt liquor, but the sweat of others that had gone uncleaned; he heard the sound of water sloshing onto the ground in another room, the moan of a man, and knew he was not lost in any act except the one of entering a bath. Curious, George thought, how different it sounded from that of those in congress down the hall—less pernicious, wholesome in its way.

  “I should go,” he said. “Let the others have their time.”

  “There are no others. I told you we have as long as you wish.”

  “Is that what you say? Do men believe that?”

  He put money down on the vanity table. It was the rest of what he’d brought to town with him. She had remained sitting on the bed all the while, legs crossed, alert. He’d watched her make a bun of her hair, strike a feather down its core to keep it in place as an arrow might pierce a heart.

  “Men think as they wish,” she said. “The next up the stairs might believe he’s my only customer, just as you believe you’re the only one hearing these cries at night, like other people don’t suffer. I can’t say who is more right.”

  He thanked her and took his leave. It was worth far more than three dollars to have the blessing of her compassion bestowed on him—so real in his heart, in every light step he took down the stairs of the whorehouse, that he cared little if such feelings were born naturally, from Clementine’s bosom, or merely from the sight of the money placed upon her desk.

  It was not just that Clementine had revived his spirit, but that she had illuminated the path he must take, the decisions that must follow. He knew, now, what Ezra had meant in the tavern, but the cry of the town was not his burden to bear. No, it was he, George, who was the burden: a burden on his family, a burden on Prentiss and Landry.

  Once more Taffy came to mind, the manner in which she had disappeared from his life, as though she had done him a service, only to be disposed of by his mother when that was accomplished. It did not matter that he had cared for her like a sister and treated her with a goodness he’d reserved for so few people in his life. What did his gratitude mean if his mother had sent her off with only a signature, a fluttering motion of her hand, as if to say, Be gone? He recalled that moment now, too, however much it pained him. He’d been beside his mother at her desk, Taffy at the door, the man’s hand—for it was a man, of course, heavy, tall, stone-faced—on the girl’s shoulder, as if she was already his. George had said nothing. No hug, no goodbye. He was stunned by what was happening, but he was only fourteen, still mournful and adrift after the death of his father. In his shock he had no way to recognize this other child’s feelings. The grip of a stranger’s hand on her shoulder. Her wracking fear of whatever might come next. George could look away—and did. But she would live with that fear forever, the knowledge that she would have to obey whatever order came out of that man’s mouth. Just as she had done with his own parents…

  But while it was too late to save Taffy, the plight of the brothers, at least, could be settled. If he had any courage at all, he could help those two. One way or another, he would secure their safe passage out of Old Ox for good.

  CHAPTER 11

  Landry roamed the countryside as he pleased. The desire to do so, the fascination with it, had once been a fear: whenever he’d stood before the forest with Prentiss in the flitting sunlight, the darkness in its farthest reaches had always felt like a monster lying in wait, one who had taken down his name long ago, eager to stake its claim on him. That was the dread Prentiss was blind to and that Landry could not describe: that these were two different worlds. That this new one might consume them as it had consumed their mother, and Little James and Esther, and then what?

  But it turned out that each step did not bring danger. The unknown led only to more clearings, more sunlight on the other end, and so it dawned on him that there was less to fear than he’d once imagined, which was maybe a truth he’d long wished to believe—that all danger carried the faint trace of comfort, all wrongs the hint of what may be right. How else to explain a world of cruelty that had also carried in it the great joy of watching his mother at the mercy of Little James’s fiddle on a Sunday afternoon, the miracle of a fresh tick mattress, the sweetness of water after a day spent picking in the fields?

  He always sought out pleasure in silence, usually on his own. Given a free Sunday, the one day of the week he and Prentiss did not work with George, Landry would wake there in the barn before the rest of the world had stirred and boil a kettle of cornmeal. He’d eat alone and leave half the pot behind. His brother, still in bed, would turn away. Prentiss was awake, Landry knew, but they didn’t speak to each other on these Sunday mornings. He’d head off with nothing and start for the woods, seeking life, any life, as long as it was different from his own.

  There were days where he encountered nothing more than a doe with her fawn, or an owl hooting from a tree branch, and if this was all he was given by the proceedings, he still walked home content. But there was also the time he came to the creek and found women. They were with children, infants, washing them in the water and soothing their cries with a chorus of humming, soft songs of reassurance. Landry was fixed there for hours, watching the women towel down the children, the mothers themselves patted dry by the sun.

  He went far enough one day to run across a plantation, one he’d never known about. There, a field of women: heads wrapped in cloth to hide from the sun, wearing men’s trousers cut into pantalets and oversize shirts, turning the soil endlessly. He counted the rows, saw how few of them had been picked clean, and knew the output would not satisfy the bosses. Sure enough, when he returned the next week the place had received a string of hardened, bitter men, convicts who worked alongside the women while still in their chains. He did not return to the place.

  Another night he wandered so great a distance that he was buried deep in the woods with little means of finding his way home save intuition. It was dark enough that the forest merged with the blackness of the sky and the world had no beginning or end, as if he might sleep upon the ground and wake up staring down from the stars. But then somewhere in the distant tree line a corona of light flared. He tracked after it, and just as it disappeared it was followed by another.

  It was two men, he saw now, as he drew closer to the flame. One of the men extinguished his torch as the pair began to climb a tree together in silence. Then, moments later, one of them sparked his torch anew and the groggy birds lining the limb sat startled in the great blast of light, too stunned to take flight. The other man clubbed them mercilessly and they dropped to the forest floor. The flame died, and Landry could only hear their rustlings as they climbed back down. The crinkle of leaves upon the ground was displaced by more silence.

  He could feel eyes on him but could not see them in th
e total blackness. He figured they were part of the forest in a manner he was not—had learned to live in the darkness so well, to exist in the farthest folds of the wild so long, that they could vanish in the shadows of the night yet still see everything around them. Suddenly his hand was wet. Something had been placed there: a pigeon, its feathers blood-slick, its body limp. There was a small crepitation of leaves again, and the footsteps receded, although the sound of their going rang in his ears all the way home.

  He had the bird in hand when he made it back to the barn. He placed it on the small table between the pallets. Prentiss, not yet asleep, stood in the back of the barn, a swirl of moths flickering about his head. The cornmeal Landry had left for him that morning was untouched.

  Prentiss walked over to Landry, inspected him, and eyed the pigeon.

  “How’d you go and do that?”

  Landry made no gesture to reply and Prentiss sat on his pallet.

  “George came by,” he said. “Tells me he’s given it a lot of thought and talked to other folk. Thinks it’s best we find our way now.”

  Landry looked over at Prentiss, and his brother stood up again restlessly and began to pace around the barn.

  “You know what I said back? I said, ‘George, how you gonna tell me what’s right for me without even knowing how I think on it? Spend your days toiling next to me, talking my ear off, but you got the nerve to say you’ve talked to everyone about me but me? That all y’all know what’s best, but then what do I know? I ain’t ever got a clue, except when it comes to those peanuts? Is that what you sayin’?’”

  Prentiss stopped himself for a moment.

  “I said us, you know. I told him he can’t speak for us.”

  He carried on pacing.

  “I showed him what we’ve saved, pulled out the rag and fanned out those dollars, and I asked after that railcar. I told him at the camps they say there’s a car that takes you on the rail up and around to wherever you wish. Just say the word. But we aim to make enough to last us once we’re there, too, that we fixin’ to be here into the fall, to see the end of peanut season, and if he has a problem with that then he can see us off but we ain’t doing it by choice, don’t care how many people he talk to. And then he said he won’t stand in no man’s way to do as he pleases, that we’re welcome here. But he still got that look on his face. I ain’t ever seen George worried that way.”

  Landry stopped listening. There was no child in Prentiss anymore. He was no different from their mother now—all his energy devoted to making sure they had full plates at every meal, enough spare clothes for the journey north, enough money saved to last a while when they got there. An unremitting focus on survival at the loss of all else. But it was also that Prentiss looked so much like their mother. Those brows that arched so delicately around soft eyes were hers. The worry in the purse of the lips. The worry of a mother. He could see her standing against the far wall of their cabin, her shoulders fixed up, the hem of her sleeping gown brushing the floor.

  The particular memory his mind had drawn upon, replacing the image of Prentiss with his mother, was one he often wished to forget. He was still a boy then, unwounded by anything but the blisters born of the field, and the searing band of pain brought on by the endless picking. It was not long after he’d first seen the fountain of Majesty’s Palace from his row, glistening there in the summer heat, each jet of water cresting and falling, gushing with such beauty that Landry thought the water must hold some special property. He requested the furrows nearest the fountain to pick, just so he might glance upon it. Once, Master Morton’s wife even took their infant boy there. She dipped him into the water, laughing all along, the sounds carrying down the furrow like a stream of water, although if they were real or something of his own mind, he could not say.

  When night fell the moon cast an exclamation upon Majesty’s Palace, shafts of lunar light touching its windows and bending to the earth beneath them with such illumination that the house appeared to be alive. Landry could see as much from the hollow window of their cabin, and when he turned and found his mother and Prentiss asleep, he walked himself to the door and opened it.

  He did not yet have his fear of rambling, and his feet moved of their own accord. He wore no pants, only his shirt, the night cool upon him. It was just as he imagined once he arrived up the lane: the fountain ran endlessly, as if fueled not by the workings of a man but by some greater power. The water was so white against the glow of the moon that it seemed like streaks of ice spouting into the air. He kept his clothes on. There was no tiptoeing, no slow procession. He leaped into the water as only a child might, a child who had waited a lifetime for this act, plunging belly-first and scraping the fountain’s bottom while the water carried over him, through him, and he gasped at the chill, but then laughed, as he had not known play like this, had not thought such a thing possible.

  He splashed about wildly. He ran back and forth, pretending Prentiss was chasing him, then dived back under. Holding his breath, he imagined the water might go down and down forever: after all, it had to go somewhere, and there was no reason he couldn’t follow it for a while, and then return for his mother and brother, and bring them along with him.

  He rose up soaking. The next sound was not his own. He looked up and could not say who it was in the distance. The front door to Majesty’s Palace was ajar, and a figure stood in the frame, watching on in silence. Landry tripped over the basin and caught himself, then broke into a sprint, the dirt stamping his feet.

  There was a moment, as he paused breathless before the cabins, when he thought it wise to continue on: beyond Majesty’s Palace, beyond Old Ox, to find a place yet unknown where the claimed might be set free, where wrongs might be forgotten. But if he was still a child, he was not dumb—not enough to think such a place existed.

  Inside their cabin his mother was silhouetted against the far wall, pacing in her gown. She always slept deeply, soundly, and with a workday ahead he’d had no reason to believe she would flinch from her dreams to notice his absence. Now she surged forward as if to whip his behind. “Boy,” she said, holding the side of his face before retrieving a rag. When she stripped his drenched shirt and washed him down he began to cry silently.

  “They gonna come, ain’t they?” he said.

  “Who, child?” She spoke softly, trying not to wake Prentiss. “Where in God’s earth did you run off to? You’re soaking wet.”

  But that was all he could say: They gonna come.

  She did not press him any further. She simply put him to bed and sat beside him, continued drying the tears from his eyes.

  “You’ve been asleep all night, child. You’ve been right here in bed. Not a soul knows different.”

  He whimpered on for a time, and in an instant a great darkness cratered in on him, and when he woke again, his mother was dressed for the fields, telling him to hurry up—as if it all, in fact, had been a dream.

  He did not know how many days passed between that night and the whippings that would follow, the breaking of his jaw, but it was some years, distant enough in time for him to imagine that each lash of the cowhide, each blow to his body, amounted to a day’s passing since his sublime trespass upon the fountain, yet near enough for him to believe that he was hardly a random victim sacrificed for the runaways and was instead guilty of a crime, that of a child wishing to play in a world that did not belong to him. If such were the case, every drop of amusement he had gathered that night in the fountain would be drained from him in the weight of blood.

  After each beating, his mother set him out like a fallen tombstone on the cabin floor and plastered his wounds with brine. It wasn’t that he lost the ability to think then, but rather that whenever he went to speak, the words got lodged in his throat. He might manage the M in Mama, but he would seize up in the middle of the word and fail to produce the end. If they asked him what he meant, he might start again, but the words would only swell up further within him. In time, even upon his healing, even when his jaw all
owed it, even when the rivers on his back shored up and no longer pulsed alongside the beating of his heart, he could not bring the words forth in whole units and began to wonder why he would wish to do so in the first place, considering how little the act of speaking had ever done for him. In the months to come, his mother would be placed in Majesty’s Palace. In a few more, she would be sold. His brother cried nightly until the seasons changed, but all of Landry’s tears had been used up already. Besides, he thought, there was more freedom in silence.

  * * *

  Early June and the peanuts were flowering. Even with their tiny, scattered yellow blooms, they were not as pretty as cotton, those long stretches of purity out of which Mr. Morton made poetics, but in these fields lay the sense of imperfection, the swelling ground cover of green bunches protruding at their leisure. The randomness felt unbridled, more in line with a world that seemed to go on with no rhyme or reason.

  There was little work to be done now. The crop needed time before harvest. Still, George had them split up, each of the four starting at a corner of the field and examining the health of the plants. Landry inspected a few, all of which looked hardy, then sat beneath the shade of a walnut tree. He put his hat upon his head and readied himself to doze. He often stole such moments, relishing the desultory enjoyment of napping when more was expected of him. But he was interrupted by a voice greeting him with a hello.

  He lifted his hat off his head, peeking out from the shadows at Isabelle, who stood in the sun, beyond the penumbra of shade, her hands clasped at her waist.

  “I was hoping we might speak,” she said.

  He still remembered their encounter at the clothesline, the moment she materialized and made herself known; those socks she wished to give him, her confusion, that glimpse of hurt when he walked off. She was an uneasy person, but an observer of things, and in this he knew they shared common ground. She had likely played through their meeting many times in her mind. It was no surprise, then, that she wished to speak with him again, however unwelcome it was in this instance.